What was J.R.R. Tolkien's first published academic paper on Beowulf called?

J.R.R. Tolkien's landmark published paper on Beowulf was called Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics.

Tolkien delivered the lecture at Oxford on 25 November 1936, and it was published in 1937. The paper argued that critics should take Beowulf's monsters seriously as central artistic elements rather than treating them as distractions from historical information.

His approach helped change modern perceptions of the Old English poem. Tolkien maintained that the poem's structure and imagery deserved literary analysis, especially its opposition between human society and the monstrous figures Grendel, Grendel's mother, and the dragon.

The essay is often discussed alongside Tolkien's fiction because it shows how his scholarship influenced his storytelling. It is not a novel, and it should not be confused with his later works on fairy stories, Old English texts, or the unfinished poem Finn and Hengest.